Content and Objectives

In the context of demographic development and the associated decline in workforce potential, the immigration of highly skilled workers from third countries has become a fixed element of all political schemes aimed at securing skilled personnel. Germany is not alone in its objective to facilitate the immigration of highly skilled workers. The ‘Battle for the Best Minds’ is a term that describes the tendency emerging in many industrial nations of aligning their immigration policy to this group of immigrants that is crucial for economic development.

Against this background, the last decade was marked by a paradigmatic turnaround in immigration policy. While the debate was characterized by Germany’s self-concept of a ‘non-immigration country’ until the late 1990s, today the focus is on creating an as attractive as possible ‘welcoming culture’. The recruiting stop for migrant labourers of the 1970s has, in the meantime, been in actuality disestablished and replaced by new legal provisions that aim to create increasingly more appealing conditions for the immigration of highly skilled workers in particular. Last year, our analyses focused on systematically describing the development of immigration of highly skilled workers and the output and outcome dimensions of German immigration policy for highly skilled third country nationals. The analyses planned together with the Federal Statistical Office for the year 2013 aim to continue in this vein and in particular to pursue the question of how well new immigrants have been able to become integrated in the labour market in recent years.

Existing studies on Germany regularly reveal that immigrants are usually not as well integrated in the labour market as the German population. These works often concentrate on the question of the extent to which there is an approximation in labour market integration between the native population and immigrants in an intergenerational comparison. While these studies focus on how integration evolves with longer durations of the immigrants in the host country, there are hardly any studies about the extent to which the time of immigration has a significant influence on labour market integration. This project’s objective is therefore to compare the development of labour market integration of new immigrants over a longer period of time (1996 to 2010) for the first time. It is of particular interest to learn whether the German immigration policy reforms in the past decade have led to improved labour market integration for the new immigrants.